Go to some open houses: Everything built within the last 20 years is just a big box built out to the edge of the property line, with the exact same boring “high ceilings, granite countertop, open floor plan, faux-everything” design. Yuuuuuck!

It must have been nice to live in the age where you could hire an architect and sit down and draft a custom home just for yourself and not have it cost an arm and a leg. My old man did this back in the 70s and he was barely middle class at the time!

Also, in the US it's very difficult to build a house out of solid wood like my house from 40s. New materials might not look as nice but are less wasteful, more energie efficient and faster to build with.

Finally, people do come to new neighborhoods, e.g. in Portland the newish neighborhoods like Pearl District are successful in the sense that they are new, high density and mixed shopping/dining/living. Not for low income though.

The result is what we see virtually mandated now in cities like Austin: A modern rehash of Soviet/Eastern Bloc housing projects, recast as "vertical mixed use" developments. Mid-rises that are invariably too tall and too close to the street, blocking out the sky and leaving just a strip of concrete to the road, which is now rendered even less useful by the copious bike lanes that no one uses because it's way too damn hot most of the year. They have only minimal windows on the exterior walls, and if there's a balcony, it's usually either a completely non-functional decorative appendage a foot deep, or it's too small for even a cafe table set. Green space and lawns (even though grasses are the most effective plants for cleaning the air), or even big trees, are discouraged.

Worse, no one wants to live in them unless they have to: First of all, they have mandated "low income housing", guaranteeing a resident population of thugs and criminals, second, the real estate is so incredibly expensive that no commercial or retail businesses can survive in the first floor locations that are supposed to provide some aspect of "community". (Austin's preferred housing model is deliberately family-hostile.)

I'll take suburban single family homes ANY day over that - this kind of "modern" architecture will crush your soul - people should be free and kings and queens of their own castles, not proles in a pod eating bugs with Big Brother on the viewscreen.

Case in point: http://designhomes.info/wp-content/uploads/2016/04/mid-centu...

The hundred-million dollar shopping centre was done up last year and it removed most of the internal landmarks and created a series of flat hallways. There is nothing to rest your eyes upon, nothing to look at.

It's one flat, dated shop after another. Usually based on some dead subculture from 10yrs ago and recent ladies' fashion trends.

The apartments went up as part of the build and that are flat cubes, copy pasted with doors and windows cut into a wall behind a front patio of flat wooden slats. Minecraft aesthetic for ferrari prices.

It is physically irritating to look for a pattern or a boundary line or a landmark and find nothing to anchor yourself. Everything is textureless and shapeless. I avoid the place.

The concept of an aspirational home is dead in my books. The traditional homes may raise the blood pressure a touch too much and seem complex.. The contemporary builds are ugly and irritating.

A sense of balance, proportion, beauty and differentiated shapes, physically calms me. It has to be updated traditional. Neo classical or french colonial or some such new variation on an outdated style.

And this is because most "modern" houses are about cramming the checklist of real-estate criteria (3 bedrooms, 2.5 baths, 2+ car garage, etc.) into a building that can then be stamped out the maximal number of times in the minimal amount of land area.

This is what happens when the value of land becomes the overriding factor.

In addition, architects derided the houses built during the post-war era, too. The difference was that the post WWII houses didn't have homeowner's associations enforcing "standards" so they evolved over time to become the "quaint" neghborhoods that everybody so loves today.

Suburbs are always going to be more hostle towards pedestrians and cyclists, and we are currently seeing a trend of people moving away from them.

Unfortunately design is often used as a tool to judge others. I had the chance to study art history, but that does not give me the right to make broad and generalized statements about where people live and what they choose to do with their lives and money.

If we want to see the ugly American McMansion go away, we should spend more time coming up with good designs that fit the needs of the people who buy them, rather than trying to convince them that what they currently own Is ugly.

Apple did this with great success. They built a product that the consumer didn't know they needed. They imparted their design principles on the public through a solid product line, rather than telling them their current computer were ugly.

People might not need McMansions, but they are still going to want then. Until there is a better design for the same price, people are going to buy them.

You're right in that certain buyers are going to be looking for certain elements that might not make much sense from a long-standing building point of view. Architectural shapes and trends change over time.

On the other hand, its also true that a lot of these trends are just bad architectural design. Period.

Sunken lounges of the 70's. Media-rooms and conspicuous consumpition-esque cavernous entrances and questionable elements in macmansions. These are designs that are incredibly difficult to repurpose into anything but their original purpose.

In my country (Aus), there is a now a common suburban design that almost entirely ignores long term elements and lessons of the environment that have been known for at least 100 years: see https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Queenslander_(architecture). Now we have a poor relation of the generic american style: dark roofs and colours, no overhangs/shelter/verandahs, directly western facing living areas and frontages, all designed to maximize internal sq meters/price.

Now, i appreciate that my queenslander example is a style built of wood traditionally. But there is another style example of highly valued real-estate with long term potential in the urban centres: victorian terraces and townhouses. Aside from the regrettable wealth signaling effect of owning one, its an architectural form that has lasted the test of time and is arguably constructible via concrete. And one of the reasons it has done so is because that form is the complete opposite of the media room/sunken lounge/mcmansion: almost universally flexible and readjustable. A proper Victorian townhouse in its context can be reclaimed and used as a bar, as a restaurant, as a residence, as an office or a place of business. Though like all succesful architecture, this is only because it works in the context of its environment.

I was unaware that "midcentury modern" was a relatively new term. My neighborhood was built up between around 1955 - 1963, and there are a lot of "modern" houses, including a couple attributed to Frank Lloyd Wright.

My family's house is a plain rectangular box with practically no decorations. Of course we bought it because of location, condition, price, etc. Inside, it's mostly "Scandinavian." The walls are white.

One thing I like about this style is that it works in a relatively small house. Things are actually smaller.

The alternative when this house was built, was orange plush carpet, grotesque wallpaper, and huge stuffed sofas.

What I see is that they have pretty poor build quality when you look closely, and are thrown together as cheaply as possible, and are not designed all that well. Where I am, "marble" would be engineered stone (which I don't have a problem with it's functional and looks okay), but many new kitchens (and bathrooms) aren't well designed for the space they take up and come with flimsy gimmicky fittings and appliances.

Where modern houses go overboard (in my opinion) is reducing optimizing floor area per dollar and making them very large. Although that's also a response to buyer preferences, people like having very big houses and don't care too much about the little details and efficiencies.

I do understand however what it is trying to say. My opinion is that housing development is vastly commoditized and builders wants tried and trusted designs at lowest prices and fastest speed. There is not much room for creativity and experimentation. I went to see houses build by Toll Brothers which are premium expensive builders and even their designs were regular with few bells and whistles only to show off. Lower end market basically just follows the template. This is extremely disappointing because house construction is something that lasts for so long.

Then they go on to list things that I associate much more with modern homes - not wasting floor space, and paying attention to the elements and light. A modern, open-concept design is optimizing much better for this than an old farmhouse where, for instance, the kitchen and formal dining room and living room are all closed off from each other. Modern homes often have floor to ceiling windows and sliding glass doors, old homes have tiny closed off windows. And old homes like the author uses as an example here are often just simple rectangles, so all the design decisions are constrained to be small square rooms. At least the "mcmansion" example in this post of a terrible new home has more interesting, non-perpendicular details and layout.

Maybe I just have an anti-nostalgia for this type of home, and maybe that makes me just as biased as the author in the opposite direction. I've never lived in a home like this but have been inside of a few of them, and they're often dark and closed in and kind of creepy. But I don't think I'm completely alone in feeling this way, there must be a reason so many horror movies are set in old farmhouses. To each their own, I guess.

(And on top of all this, I would argue that this kind of permeating attitude about new homes just not being special like old homes are plays a huge part in the current housing shortage crisis that much of the US faces, but I won't even go into that).